Abstract
Reviewed by: Johannes Koll, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria
Between Yesterday and Tomorrow reads as a historiographical rectification of those approaches that tend to reduce the post-war history of European integration to the efforts of a handful of leading politicians and bureaucrats to create what finally has become the European Union. Against a teleological and elitist interpretation, Christian Bailey explicitly deals with ‘lost Europes’ (2), i.e. ideas that were discussed by intellectuals and politicians without being realized in the end. According to him, quite a few concepts of Europe had their roots in the nineteenth century and the interwar period, and did not serve as blueprints for the process of European integration that actually took place during the Cold War.
Placing himself within New Intellectual History, Bailey focuses on the notions of Europe as expressed by the journal Merkur. Deutsche Zeitschrift für Europäisches Denken, and by two organizations: the Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund (ISK) and Das Demokratische Deutschland, which was constituted during the Nazi era in Switzerland with the aim of overcoming stringent party lines. The sample of case studies embraced (liberal) conservatives or Christian Democrats, socialists and Social Democrats. On the whole, the author distinguishes different focal points for the conceptualization of European orientations: Westernization as a commitment to transatlantic values, the inclusion of Central Europe as a historical core of Europe, and a rather traditionalist discourse on Abendland. In how far – and in which form – democracy has been discussed by right-wing and left-wing concepts forms one of the main interests of the book.
Notwithstanding their heterogeneity, the concepts of Europe devised by Merkur, ISK and Das Demokratische Deutschland aimed at a certain autonomy vis-à-vis the Eastern and the Western blocs and the political pull of the Cold War. They also had in common that they were not really compatible with policies pursued by the leaderships of the two big German parties. The essential attention paid to the Central European countries despite the existence of the Iron Curtain, for example, was opposed to the politics of Westernization followed by the Christian Democratic chancellor Konrad Adenauer. The Social Democratic opposition leader Kurt Schumacher, on his part, did not have a high regard for some of the socialist Third Force theories of European integration developed within ISK. Finally, the emphasis which the highly federalist-oriented members of Das Demokratische Deutschland laid on local and regional entities as the basal political and administrative constituents of a future Europe was designed as a challenge to the self-evident priority accredited to the nation-state by large parts of public opinion after May 1945. Thus, the visions of Europe studied by Bailey did not represent the majority of party members, let alone the majority of German society.
This, however, does not diminish their historical relevance. On the contrary, Bailey’s sample of selected media and organizations is apt to uncover some of those ‘lost Europes’ which enriched the controversial discourse on Europe in the immediate post-war years. To a certain degree, the findings meet the author’s own call that the history of European integration ‘should be studied as a broader and less unidirectional cultural and intellectual history of encounters and cooperations between European peoples, organizations and institutions across the course of the twentieth century’ (198). Though this approach is not as novel as presented by the author, it is worth being further pursued by future research. It is also worth considering Bailey’s assumption that détente and Ostpolitik deployed by Willy Brandt in the 1960s, and even the unification of the two German states in 1989/90, hardly are comprehensible without bearing in mind earlier Third Way conceptions of Europe and the refusal to give up Central Europe notwithstanding the imperatives of the Cold War. In spite of the subtitle, however, which suggests a coherent analysis of concepts about Europe from the mid-twenties to the early 1950s, the interwar period remains largely unexplored and vague. The discourses of the 1920s and 1930s are presented more or less as incidental. The repeatedly asserted relevance of interwar notions on Europe for the German post-war society does seem convincing, but is lacking empirical backing for most parts of the book. And, especially with regard to the conservative discourse on Abendland, I am missing any reference to the legacy of National Socialist ideas on Europe after the downfall of the Third Reich.
Nevertheless, Bailey’s book opens long-term perspectives, and offers a thorough analysis of selected non-dominant ideas about Europe in Germany in the 1940s and 1950s.